According to officials of a Webinar titled “Listening Is No Longer Enough,” customers are providing feedback to all parts of the organization: “The time is now to link that insight and take action – or risk losing customers to competitors.”

More and more, webinar organizers say, customers are sharing compliments, complaints, and ideas with multiple departments across an organization – an extension of the social media phenomenon, where if a customer gets bad service, all their Facebook friends know about it whether the company does or not.

In response, savvy organizations are moving from annual and transactional surveys to using voice of the customer in real time across the enterprise, from product marketing to sales to R&D, webinar officials say: “What's more, these companies are combining that data to get deep insight into customers' needs, preferences, and expectations.” But sadly, most firms simply collect customer feedback that does little more than pad out reports. No action on the customer voice, get ready for more Facebook bashing.

BayBridge is offering a webinar as a “Three-Part Series: Forecasting, Planning, and Analysis for Complex Contact Center Operations.”

Series 1 was presented Thursday, May 19.

“Forecasting and Planning with Significant Uncertainty and Planning for Unforeseen Events” is the title and a pretty good description of the content that will be presented. “While forecasting in general is fraught with uncertainty, it is even more so today. We will discuss analytic methods for analyzing forecast risk and methods for planning for unknown events,” say webinar officials.

Webinar officials say, contact center operations have certainly gotten more complex. Today more and more companies are searching for new ways to improve their operational efficiency, and as they do so, they “have leaned on the teams that have proven themselves to be experts at solving complex operational problems: the contact center workforce analysis teams.”

Because of the success associated with call center forecasting, planning, and scheduling, according to webinar officials, “these teams are being asked to apply their technologies and expertise to other contact types: email, chat, back-office, and outbound contact types. This certainly presents a challenge.”

A recent webinar titled “Six Simple Strategies for Improving Schedule Adherence in your Call Center” was offered by Monet Software, dealing with the thorny issue of ensuring there is the right number of staff with the right skills in their seats at the right times of the day.

“One of the toughest jobs related to managing any call center may not be the intricate calculations of proper forecasting nor the numerous iterations of coming up with the best schedule mix,” webinar officials noted, adding that “some call centers are much more successful than others at this schedule adherence dilemma.”

In other words, how do you get staff to show up for work on time and stick to their planned break times, as well as generally acceptable time on various work tasks?

Presenter Penny Reynolds from the The Call Center School, a well-known expert on such issues, discussed such issues as the quantify the cost and service implications of missing staff, identifying ways to communicate and educate staff on the “power of one” in call center staffing, identifying the reasons why staff don't adhere to the schedule plan and finding reward and consequence programs that support adherence goals.

Officials of the HTLT Hills B Optimizer Pro for call center management ask: Do your resource forecasts result in optimal projection levels? Are your call center staff schedules and cost projections usually within objective accuracy levels? And does your current system allow you to easily perform ‘What if’ exercises?

If you answered “yes” to all those, then congratulations, you’re doing an aces job. But if you think you could use a bit of help getting to “yes,” then you might want to check out HTLT’s Hills-B Optimizer Pro (HBO Pro) to, in company officials’ words, “overcome deficiencies associated with the use of Erlang-C and other classic queuing models.”

The tool is pitched by company officials as a way to achieve realistic” results when performing “the four major steps involved with effective call center management.”

Most Workforce Management Systems today use the Erlang-C model for staffing projections, but Erlang-C “cannot be used for all of the ‘what if’ scenarios that address information on variability and extremes, because the results provided by the model are only averages of key performance measures,” HTLT officials say.